september 2014

September 2014:

I was heavily pregnant with my due date being just weeks away. My best friend had come in for Memphis, waiting for the boy to be born so that she could be my doula. I had stopped working by this point because I honestly couldn’t stand for more than fifteen minutes at a time, and less face it, bedside nurses are on their feet for way longer than 15 minutes at a time. Bending over when I dropped something, attempting to maneuver and situate patients, handling material that wasn’t necessarily safe if exposed, and going into contact rooms of patients with highly contagious diseases was starting to become less appealing as time went on anyway.

I remember that I was lying in my bed and my phone rang and it was the kids’ Dad, John (formerly known as Jay if you’ve read back into my journaling at all). Even to this day, when I see his name pop up on my phone I get a jolt of cold anxiety through my body, but for some reason I answered.

He preceded to tell me that he’d been in jail the last couple of days. That he and his then-girlfriend had been fighting and one of her friends got scared for her and called the police. The police came and he was arrested for domestic violence for hitting her with a cord of a baby monitor (with marks and all) and his parents had bailed him out. We had a long conversation about how bad she was for him, and how laid back the kids were now that he wasn’t seeing her for the last few days. He talked about all the horrible things she’d done to him. He concluded he needed to end his relationship with her. He wasn’t allowed to see her anyway, there was an order of protection and he would go back to jail if he was caught in the same store as her, let alone at her house.

Maybe two days later, it was almost 1 am and I get a call from a number I do not recognize. I don’t generally answer calls from numbers I am not familiar with, but the time of the day that this was happening sent up a few red flags.

Police had seen John’s car at a church across the street from where he lived. They knew of the situation because one of the officers was his arresting officer. So they went to the house to check on his girlfriend. When she answered the door, I guess she was acting very strange and they heard a noise from the back of the house so one officer went around and found him kicking his way out of a window and then preceded to run through the field to escape them. They caught him, arrested, charged with violating an order of protection and evading police. I found out later that they had also been fighting at that time, and that when he crawled out the window he crawled OVER our son to get out of the house. The call was from the police, because the kids needed to be given to me because he would be in jail until his court date as there would be no bond to release him.

I got the kids the next morning. His girlfriend and I had decided that it was better they sleep. Actually, the reason I was even called was because she had requested that they stay for the night, otherwise the police would have immediately taken them into custody as well.

The next day, I made a thousand phone calls. I had approximately 2 weeks before he was out of jail.

I remember when our divorce was finalized my attorney said, “Marie, he will mess up some day. Bide your time, wait and watch. He will screw up, and you’ll get them back.” Now was my time. Arrested twice and refusing to stay away from the person that he was ordered to, running away from the police, and his general attitude would not win him any favors.

And then I had my kids. I was 39 weeks pregnant and they were home. I kept them out of school for two days while I got an attorney, an amazing woman who had an immediate plan. Emergency Custody Order – he can’t take care of the kids while he’s in jail.

And then things came out. Years worth of physical violence the kids had witnessed over the last few years. A couch flipped over and into Girlfriend while she was pregnant, grabbing and dragging her through the house, hitting, kicking, throwing. There were pictures of bruises, black eyes, things of that nature. She was willing to testify against him – the kids deserved to be with their mother, she said. And my attorney rolled with that.

See, children witnessing violence is also considered a type of child abuse in the eyes of the law. Not all judges feel that way, but there was a new judge in town and my attorney knew him, and knew that his mind was always in the best interest of the children. She was confident that the kids would stay safely with me, at least for a little while, while we worked out and attempted to get full custody of them.

In the meantime, I kept bringing them to school 45 minutes away and let them see their grandma and their little brother. I was so pregnant I could barely move, but I didn’t want to uproot them entirely at least until I knew what was going on. They’d get to talk to their Dad on the phone occasionally, which was fine. He’s their Dad and I wasn’t going to keep him from them entirely – the real problem was between him and his girlfriend not him and the kids, and ultimately I knew it would make me more favorable in the eyes of the court.

The kids were so happy too. They’d be there when their little brother was born and I think they really felt at home for the first time. The anxiety of being around their dad and his girlfriend fighting had been lifted entirely. They weren’t be bombarded with the negativity of the abuse that was going on in their home. I was equally relieved and sad for them, that in all the abuse they’d witnessed I could only do something about it after the police had been called he’d been arrested. I’d tried, multiple times, but based off of the kids accounts alone I could do nothing because their Dad would just deny that anything wrong was happening.

But they were home, and for 2 glorious weeks we didn’t work about their Dad at all because he couldn’t even call or drive by or do anything from where he was sitting and it was amazing.